On the other hand, perhaps the Brits are more aware of class effects because those really are stronger and clearer than in France. Even though the french top universities are populated with mainly richer middle class children, there is, as far as I know, nothing so strong and clear as the large fraction of Oxbridge students from elite private schools.

So, the mild obsession of the Brits with fairness in education and careers might be the healthy result of efforts to make society as little class-based as possible. or it is a symptom of a society where class is important, and everything is needed to keep it in check. It is hard to say.

The French system always strikes me as being more class-based than the British one, or at least with fewer prospects for changing your class as an adult as it’s so heavily determined by university.

I really wish it were possible to have a discussion on how to improve the British education system without getting bogged down in class trench warfare.

In the UK, university entrance is based at least in part on results from nationwide exams that are aimed at testing what students know, called A-levels. In the NZ system when I went through, the equivalent exams were called Bursary. We started studying calculus in 5th form (age 15) as it was part of the School Certificate maths exam. Then it was extended in 6th form, so anyone who managed to get a good mark on Bursary Maths with Calculus (age 17) had been doing calculus for three years running and as far as I know we all knew the basics of calculus by that point. (I did so well in the Bursary exams as to be able to skip the first year of university, and my problems with university were caused by a lack of practice with studying, not a lack of basic knowledge of calculus).

I think the difference is that with calculus knowledge being formally and externally assessed twice over the last three years of high school, schools in NZ had a significant incentive to teach it thoroughly. And the repetition drummed it into our heads.

The American system, which appears determined to try to catch the poor kid with bad teaching but innate academic potential, doesn’t strike me as having the same incentives to make calculus stick.

However, on thinking about it, I am prepared to be convinced that high school English teaches students nothing useful for university. After all, I dropped it the moment I could at high school based on reasoning that I wasn’t learning anything, so I’m badly placed to argue with university lecturers on this point.

I feel dyslexic all the time in this country (Japan). I can see how it could easily be confused for a lack of effort – which is precisely the reason I am always mangling my characters.

I’ve wondered if dyslexia causes as much trouble with chinese characters.

a) high schools teach calculus (and for that matter high school physics) but …

b) we can’t rely on the curriculum or the standards so …

c) we essentially reteach all this material anyway. There isn’t `some remedial calculus’. They mostly need calculus taught from the beginning, period.

There is some allowance made for `advanced placement’ courses, but often these aren’t as good as what they are supposed to replace. IB students are in better shape. Some schools & programs can get away with jumping over it, but that’s not usual

I’m certainly not saying you can take an 8th grader and throw them at this stuff and expect they will be find. The point about the 8th (to 10th or so, really) grade stuff is that this is what (and only what) it is assumed incoming college students actually know, and this mostly what gives people trouble as freshmen. I’ll agree that there is probably a strong correlation between those who have done well in a 11th or 12th year calculus course and those who have decent fundamental algebra etc. However, a motivated student with decent fundamentals will do just fine with the intro calculus stream (which is more ambitious what the high schools do, not that this is saying much), even though she is sitting in a class with people who have nominally `done’ calculus.

It’s much the same with intro physics. Nobody relies on the material in high school being mastered, it’s all covered again. Part of this is because physics typically repeats topics anyway (with better tools each time).

A friend of mine was a high school dropout who began learning mandarin working as a busboy in a chinese restaurant. By 23 he was managing a nightclub for party functionaries in the PRC and at 25 he owned a bar in Taipei. This was in the early 80’s.
Now he’s an importer, and I make some of my income working with him. He’s also very dyslexic. I’ve wondered if dyslexia causes as much trouble with chinese characters.
Education is about patience and the ability to sit on your ass. It’s about planning. It’s also about following order and kissing ass. Most of the time its not about picking up an instrument and using it.
Education and intelligence have less to do with one another than the educated want to believe.

Also, see if you can puzzle out why US figures differ from UK figures and differ so much between entrepreneurs and middle management in larger corporations…the author’s stab at it comes to no clear conclusions.

When people talk about doctors, engineers, physicists or statisticians having to merely “pass a battery of tests” I think they are forgetting the 3-7 years of hands-on training those people received at university that are very difficult to receive anywhere else. Software is rather unique in this regard – it is quite difficult to get access to cadavers, but rather easy to get access to Visual Basic compilers.

So your comment about doing it elsewhere (`remedial calculus’) is a valid question, but applies to the vast majority of all entering students. Really it comes down to who teaches service courses like this, and how.
Personally, I’d like to see the grade & high school curriculum throw out things like calculus and do a better job of fundamentals, but that seems to be unlikely at this point.

slocum’s point is that there’s a lot of rent seeking by universities. Agreed. There’s also a lot of rent seeking within them (breadth requirements are a mostly generated by rent-seeking by departments that couldn’t pay their way. I don’t see what the educational value could be, eg, of requiring that 18-22 year olds whom one can pretty much guarantee will never learn the language in question have to take 3 semesters of a foreign language). The demand for high levels of HE participation comes out of a conspiracy between employers (who want to offload the costs of identifying talent and, to a lesser extent, training workers) and middle and upper middle class parents who want to assure social closure for their kids and are caught up in a game in which the best way to do that seems to be getting them into college, and in which they can call for that while seeming (and perhaps believing themselves) to care about everyone getting an important good—access to the life of the mind.

That’s what I think on cynical days, anyway.